App of the Week: Dock Library

Mac’s aren’t known for their customization abilities. They don’t have much customization beyond the ability to change your desktop background, the transparency of your menubar, and the color scheme of your stoplight (the close, minimize, and zoom buttons in the top left hand corner of your window). It would be nice if you had a little more customization, and one thing I like to customize is the Dock. If you’ve seen any of my videos in the past couple of months, you’ll notice that my dock is the standard translucent white colored dock, with blue orb lights. Instead, I have a black reflective dock, with elongated blue bars to show activated apps (they kind of remind me of the Tron lights). To make these customizations, I used Dock Library to easily help me customize me dock.

Dock Library is a really REALLY simple tool to customize your dock. It has 3 large buttons in the main menu: one to add a dock style to your library, one to remove a style from your library, and one to activate the selected style as your current dock. That’s all there is to it. To add a dock style to your library, just download one from the Internet, click “Import” in

Dock Library

Dock Library, and then select the folder. Then when you want to activate the style, your just select it in the app and hit “Activate”. Your Dock will restart, and the next thing you know, your dock has a little more personal flair to it.

Dock Library only lets you pick from downloaded and premade styles, it doesn’t let you pick and make your own. To do that, you have to go into Finder and edit the folders. So for someone wanting a lot of control, you won’t get that much control. However, a bigger issue is that it seems the app is no longer being developed on. So while the app works on Lion, there is no guarantee it will work in future versions of OSX. However, even if the app is no longer in development, your dock styles won’t change, even if you delete the app. And in the end, there’s a default dock setting so that you can always return your dock to the way it started.

Dock Library is a very simple app for those who want a different look for their dock. It works on OS 10.5 and higher. The app was created by Dative Studios, and your can download it for free at http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26972/dock-library. If you want to download any dock themes, you might go to a site like leoparddocks.com (and yes, the themes work for Snow Leopard and Lion). If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about this or any other topic, leave a comment below or email me at easyosx@live.com You can also check me out on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube by hitting the buttons on the top of your screen. You can also check out my Google Plus Page. Thanks!